I am having problems with custom keyboards in android.
Currently the username is being input with a capital letter if the user is using a custom keyboard.
In my mind the users don't notice the capital letter on their username and thus I am getting a lot of forgotten username straight after their registration.
Is it better to just force all usernames to be lowercase?
I would say, from a development standpoint, you should set the usernames to lowercase before storage and before comparison. The user can continue to believe that the username is whatever case they thought it was. In your interface, you can show their username as lowercase, and the user will be able to understand.
As a programmer: Technically there is no difference between lowercase or uppercase. In other words: "Name" and "name" don't make a difference when finding a user. Unless you force it to be case-sensitive. But I wouldn't do that.
Even if you can't search your data case-insensitive, you can always lowercase the username before starting the search.
If you'd like the username to be shown in your view with a capital letter you can do this by code aswell.
So I'd say; don't force them to use lowercase, you can choose how to show it to them programmatically.
select * from users where username=LOWER('MonkeyZeus') then any DB indexes which you had on that field go out the window and performance suffers. Your app should convert the data to lower/upper case before creating a SQL statement from it. You can create a non-searchable vanity_username field and return that if you wish but the field which is searched against should be maintain either lower or upper case.
Commented
May 9, 2014 at 19:05
No, it's not ok to alter someone's username. Because some people are very meticulous about how their usernames should look like. Of course, other people are completely unaware about letter cases, and it is these people that keep "forgetting" what their username was.
I believe the most reasonable approach would be to store the usernames exactly as they were entered, whereas when searching for a given user the search should be case-insensitive. This is how file names in Windows work: you can have "File.txt", or "file.TXT", but not both.
